Book Review: All American by Burk Uzzle

Selected moments

Burk Uzzle is primarily a photojournalist (he was a member of Magnum for fifteen years) and many of the pictures here captures a moment similar in style to Winogrand, Freidland or Davidson. The book has ninety-four photos Uzzle took in the eighties and most of them show folk relaxing. The intro by Martha Chahroudi says he regularly covered the Mummers Parade in Philadelphia and biker meets at Daytona Beach, Florida. The photos of the later are bright, flashy-in-your-face images of the machines or bikers, predictably all wearing shades.

There are several quite remarkable photos here, which on the surface seem quite ordinary: a football team having their photo taken with an almost black silhouette of a steel-mill in the background; several trees waiting to be planted along a highway with their trunks pointing in different directions; a little girl sitting on an oversize chair; a store worker, bent double, pushing a store display along the sidewalk.

This is one of those photo books that reveal a bit more every time you look through the pages. It was published in conjunction of an exhibition of Uzzle's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1984/85. Book designer Katy Homans did a nice job handling the images, several blank pages, generous margins and different sizes make the photos work.

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